Designing believable interaction by applying social conventions

One of the goals of the research al en of believable agents is to incorpora te those capabilities that can make interaction with agents realistic and b elievable. We argue that it is necessary to consider social conventions in designing believable interaction; they are mechanisms used by conversation partners to coordinate behavior and communication. As a starting point, we began by identifying essential social conventions that are used to coordina te interaction in the physical world. We performed an empirical study to in vestigate how these conventions are used by people in virtual environments when they interact; we were interested to see which conventions were used n aturally and how they influenced behavior. In our results, we report how th ese conventions were used to regulate behavior in virtual environments. We present design recommendations for how these results can be applied to guid e the design of believable interaction.